Wrapping up

August 12, 2007

I promised some screen shots of plazes-enabled geoclue. Well, this is what I see when I connect to the wireless network of the summer cafe just around the corner here:

When the connection is made, the plazes position provider checks if the plazes.com database knows the location of the MAC address of the router. If plazes.com has a “plaze” with that MAC address, geoclue emits current_position_changed and civic_location_changed D-BUS signals with all the details so all applications interested in location information find out about the change immediately. I think this’ll work very nicely for commonly visited places.

At the moment I’m working on a usable manual position provider, a kind of backup position provider for the inevitable situation when there are no automatic providers available. That wasn’t as simple as I assumed (anything with user interaction is tricky to get right…), but should be done in a day or two. The rest of the week is reserved for wrapping things up before the Summer of Code deadline, August 20th: bug fixing; new releases of geoclue, the statusbar applet and the demo app (finally uploading to the Extras-repository); documentation and uploading everything to code.google.com.

In case anyone’s wondering: I definitely won’t be going away when Summer of Code ends. Geoclue is just getting to the point where it is interesting: It’s already usable and there’s a growing interest from 3rd party developers. I’m now quite familiar with the code base and have several improvement ideas.

Interested in the position API? Take action now!

Speaking of improvement ideas… if you’re interested in the Geoclue positioning API you should take action right now: We are (or mostly Keith Preston is) making some needed changes in the API and now is the time to voice any concerns or wishes — the plan is to freeze the position API after this. Take a look at the current API definition and comment on the mailing list.